Learning mixtures of arbitrary gaussians

Abstract

Mixtures of gaussian (or normal) distributions arise in a variety of application areas. Many techniques have been proposed for the task of finding the component gaussians given samples from the mixture, such as the EM algorithm, a local-search heuristic from Dempster, Laird and Rubin~(1977). However, such heuristics are known to require time exponential in the dimension (i.e., number of variables) in the worst case, even when the number of components is $2$.